Blog

Do you have a fixed deposit account? FD, or time based deposit? What is the interest rate given to you by the banks? In countries like Japan or Switzerland, it could be close to 0.1%. Even placing a 12 month fixed deposit, the returns are meagre. 1% or 2% or 3% even 5% is sometimes below the REAL rate of inflation. The government will hide the REAL inflation. We all know that, but as people under the Empire, we bow down our heads. Nobody dares to be Skywalker or Han Solo.

Bitcoin doesn’t pay a dividend. What else could you do? How about NEO, the Ethereum of China? They are perhaps the only one officially paying a dividend via the NEO Gas token. This is not clams or coins that are in the 0.0001 cents material. This is a bona fide Top 100 CoinMarketCap coin – GAS – and the current value per Gas is over $30 USD.

According to this site that helps you calculate the dividends, the returns are about 7.6%. Much much more than the fix deposits you ever had in your entire life.

Give it a go. Enter an amount of Neo you have (or hope you have) then see the calculated earnings! www.neotogas.com

Had came across several pages that used Shapeshift’s API. Then found their rates are a tad high for the convenience. So here is another fast coin change system, that is as anonymous as Shapeshift (no need for submitting documents) yet provide a level of security with your email. (Shapeshift don’t require your email so sometimes you feel what happens when things just freeze or internet disconnect just when the transaction was processing?)

Here is Changelly (note: referral link), else if you prefer you can go directly to their website.

*Fiction / story post
Some years ago, there was a movie GI JOE, that featured the rise of the Cobra Commander. He was initially introduced as the mad scientist role for the leader. Then eventually, he has his own manifesto planned and executed, and his NEW organisation Cobra was created.

In Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Cobra Commander is mightily creative too. In his mind, it could be game theory taken from Nash. Pitting miners, users, nodes, developers “against each other”, or “co-op-petition” (cooperative competition), fused with a legendary genesis storyline, with a mysterious founder, that disappears in thin air, without a trace by any governmental surveillance or espionage body.

Of course, Cobra Commander’s main goal is Global Domination! ARH!! HAHA! (*suppose to come with protracted sinister villain laughter, or maybe soundtrack music from “Inception”)

Bitcoin Cobra Commander has that playing it out well. With Bitcoin topping the race, speeding ahead more than twice the second placed Ethereum. In late April, Investopedia noted there is 30 billion USD in total market capitalization. Four months later in August, it is 5 times more at 160 billion.

Creating segmented limitations in the design of the protocol, Cobra Commander knew groups would have to come on head to head, much akin like The Joker’s bluff in the Batman “The Dark Knight” play – two detonator devices on the hands of the other boat, of the opposing forces. Brilliant. Sinister?

Well, the eventually was still called “up to the consensus”, up to the market. If you recalled or if you haven’t watched The Dark Knight featuring Health Ledger (LEGEND!) – then take time to watch it.

Now, to the chagrin of purists, there is another set of Bitcoin. Bash (as I called it). Bashing the altcoins. Appearing in the Top 10 in the first day of it’s existence without any VC funding, fake CEO, lawyers, or ICOs. Bitcoin Cash. B-ASH. BCH. BCC.

Over the course of the next few years or sooner, like months, GLOBAL DOMINATION!

There will be one more. Two more bitcoins. Like Katy Perry or Michael Jackson. Not just one hit single from one album. BUT super awesome-ness, multi-hit-singles from a SINGLE album. Topping the charts all at the same time. Bitcoin will be topping the Number 1, Number 3, Number 8 positions. All other altcoins will be shivering, collapsing within themselves.

A group could setup Bitcoin with secure anonymous transaction (that is possible within the Lightning Network – or I call it the black box since those coins staked within it just mixes all transactions, cancels all out, and spurts out the final tally without showing who paid who paid what).

Another group could splinter Bitcoin to fully implement the sidechain Rootstock, built on top of Bitcoin that will obliterate the smart contracts world – aka Ethereum. Boom!

Another group could metamorph-tosis (metamorphosis + mitosis) Bitcoin into their original atomic class, Satoshi – and let them flood and eliminate those micro tokens such as Ripple, IOTA.

Had a yoga teacher who taught about observing some poignant movements in the moon. Full moon. Red moon. Eclipse.

This could be a fiction that turns into reality.

There is a solar eclipse happening on 21st August. A solar eclipse is when the moon moves in front of the rays of the sun, thereby creating an environment of darkness during the daytime, at specific paths on the planet. This particular solar eclipse will span the entire width of the USA.

Safety is number one. Do prepare proper viewing glasses with good UV protection.

Bitcoin will be having an eclipse event too. After being confused by several differing news site, apparently, according to XBT.eu – Segwit will activate around that date. (So – Segwit has not activated yet – today is the 16th).

CORRECTIONS: *Segwit was not yet activated. It was SIGNALLED to be activated. And activates after 2016 blocks. See this new post.

Supposedly, there is a rumour there shall be another mitosis.

In short, Bitcoin Segwit2X or X2 portion may not be executed. Or better choice of word – activated. Therefore, in the main (is it original now?) chain, or Core chain, there might be a consensus by a group to do a mitosis and to activate the X2 portion – increasing the blocksize to 2MB.

Segwit has activated. Fees and mempool went down 4 to 5 times on 12th August. See chart:

Then now it’s back to square one. Are nodes using Segwit? Is it activated and operational? Trying to find out more. Theoretically, by the Core Developers, and even Aantonop, Segwit will “shave off” perhaps conservatively 25% space used.

What else could have happened? Perhaps many newcomers are using bitcoins for the first time? Then they start to buy, send, receive, store, and hence more transactions. That lead to these buildup again.

The next step, if per the NYA agreement, is for activation of a 2MB blocksize increase.

If it is not happening for whatever reasons, some people will still go ahead and do it. This has been done successfully. Look at Bash. It’s bashing the altcoins and making at least one coin obsolete. Litecoin is totally destroyed and made obsolete by Bash. (Bitcoin Cash)

*Many people use the word fork, but to my interpretation and explanation – it’s a mitosis. Your key DNA will be on two chains. You’re not on a road, and taking left or right. That’s a fork. A road fork and you have to choose. A mitosis, is a full copy of the DNA. Coin mitosis. Metamorphosis would have sounded way cooler.

Following that, the Core chain have plans for setting up Lighting Network. This is essentially creating off-chain blocks or segments. Or black boxes. TO have these black boxes, you have to put in a few coins literally. You are staking a few coins to be validated as a “member” of a particular Lightning Black Box. So it’s like a proof-of-stake (staking your coins) to participate in a fast transfer. Anything within that Box, can cancel out each other”s transaction of n-parties. A pays B, B, pays C, C pays D, and B pays D. After the accounting is done, then it’s broadcasted into the blockchain the final transacted value, instead of the individual transactions. (*if doesn’t make sense or unsure, don’t understand – send a message in the Page)

We could have that mitosis and the outcome is another Bitcoin X. It could be called Bitcoin 2X. Bitcoin X2. Bitcoin Turbo. Bitcoin ABC. I prefer Turbo. That cute snail animation movie.

Regardless, the dao of Bitcoin will survive. We would in fact have several more Bitcoins. Except for Bitcoin Dark (which is a fake Bitcoin, not of the original Genesis block so beware!).

These Bitcoins will be in the Top 10 of the market cap page. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

Proposal: Create a defence emergency BIP that will put in the functions of Emergency Difficulty Adjustments that are found in the Bitcoin Cash implementations. This could be a backup plan, ready to roll anytime. Does it need signalling or not? It depends. But I could foresee if the Chain Death Spiral situation ever occurs, there would be chaos in the exchanges, nothing gets confirmed, panic, and a standstill. Many developers will be in a hot room, crisis centre. And in that crisis centre, they will think of this solution. And implementation could be a “hard fork” if you like to use that term.

Issue: Blockchain Database Size Getting Way Too Large. It takes about 7 days to download, syncronise, validate the whole blockchain onto a computer. (According to Tone Vays in The Bitcoin Game podcast.

Proposal: (literally) Chop Blockchain at a set interval. There is difficulty adjustments every 2016 blocks. Perhaps a mechanism to Chop the Blockchain by yearly basis. So there are Year 2009, Year 2010, up until Year 2016 – yearly blocks that were chopped up, yet there is a protocol to re-attach them at the node. Think of it as Winzip splitting a ZIP file then user can select each year they want to connect to their node. Likely, users can download Year 2016, then synchronise with the “active or hot year or LIVE year” for this example year 2017 current live block.

Issue: Bitcoin address too hard to use by normal humans.

Proposal: Create a Bitcoin Name Service layer. It could be a layer, or a server style. The server style can be attached to Lightning network hence it is still distributed at the Lightning network’s node. These will all sync with each other. Some people will come with the question like who gets allocated what name/names? Is it like domain name companies, people hoarding special names?

So for example, Person A wants to “register” his bitcoin address “1Mk354xfF” to be “aantonop”. At the same time, Person B also wants to register to be “aantonop”. Person B could be Andreas Antonopoulos, the great Bitcoin Philosopher.

For blockchain dao (dao as in Dào), consensus mechanism and searching for the nonce can be applied, perhaps tied to a function in a transaction. How it is played out or programmed – someone have to figure it out, developers anyone? As we know, searching for the nonce is akin to a lottery. Mining is searching for the nonce. And you are the winner if you found it. And if you won you get the block reward. And the block reward is 12.5 bitcoins. So far so good? (yes many people still don’t understand mining that’s why I am explaining patiently in most of my postings)

So Person A and Person B performs this transaction that will determine the winner of getting the alias or name “aantonop” to be attached to their Public Key. The winner will be verified, recorded for sure in the blockchain. That’s the use and immutability of the blockchain.

Dash seems to be implementing something like this. Ethereum too but they are doing it by the dot com way – BIG money can buy the name “aantonop”. So that is not in the spirit and dao of Blockchain and Bitcoin.

Earlier in the year when things started moving for the altcoins, during the time when example Dash went from $50 to $200, Ethereum Classic too went from $5 to $15. Here is a short lesson of doing your own homework, research. Herd mentality affected my thinking. Without doing much research, the only “research” was – wow Ethereum tripled, tripled, then tripled, from $5 to $50, to $100, to $200, to $300 to close to $400. “SO, therefore” – Ethereum Classic too will go up, and put a ball park number of 10% of Ethereum, that gives me $40 value. Wow. Genius.

NOT. That was no research. Speculation. I learn this lesson.

After the fact of buying at the high price, and paid the high price did I, then I did the real research that I promised myself.

I want to find the “Proof of Contract”. Ethereum and the original chain, original belief system, clearly states they are not a currency. They are distributed smart contracts. So where can I get these contracts? Find them? Observe them grow?

That was my search from my research. From Cointelegraph to Coindesk, to Merkle. There was only one article after 2 months, on some validation system using Classic platform. There was no ICO, even though ICO is quite the another story of the herd mentality game.

Clearly the killer app, or the smart money contact, is luring projects to launch within Ethereum using the moniker and packaging of an ICO.

Ethereum Classic had none.

Hence after some further months of searching, I had to conclude that this is a dead end.

ICO is the rage. The money grabber. Some good projects. Some good projects but does it need an ICO or a coin for it? Maybe not. Some lousy projects. Some lousy programming and they were hacked out of their Ethereum DURING their ICO campaign. Some after.

Regardless, ICO was the killer app for Ethereum. It drew companies and ideas to try to launch. Try to show a white paper. Lots of them were marketed strongly.

Some due to the clout of their CEO and marketing, “succeeded” with capital raised even more than their platform’s origin. Was it 10 million or 50 million? Now these snazzy new ICO coins are getting $100 million.

One ICO specifically says they will keep 33% for themselves. That is quite a lot. Basically an inverted tax regime of 33%. Yet investors and sheeps went in. Even ships, and trucks. They have a running system. They need users. But they certainly did not need to make a token to be sold to raise money since they already have money from the original investors and VC money.

Other ICOs were linked with banks, with the institutions that are out to take the GOLD out of the ordinary MAN. And SACK them.

Still dozens get involved because the of the gleaming notion of the Classic example above. And classic it is too, as a matter of fact.

The greatest tech ICO ever was free. It was the Satoshi Nakamoto’s ICO. And his coin was Bitcoin. There was no bias. There was no inverted tax for the founder. No special treatment to the investors if any. It was as astoundingly great as water, that is paradoxically very valuable, yet priced at a very low dollar value.